The year ended, and I invited the teams I work with to hold year-end retrospectives. Since I use the main tool for visualization and retro design, I decided to look for templates.Miro has a wonderful "MiroVerse" tool. This is essentially an internal social network in which users and creators post their work. Through a search, I came up with a cool template for a retrospective for the year called Reflection Island: End of Year Team Retro by Aryanna Martin

Many thanks to her and I sincerely advise you to pay attention to it)

What is the essence of the template and why exactly can it make a cool retro performance at the end of the year?First, the structure and path of the user on the board. Here is my experience after conducting 5 retrospectives. 

Stage 1: “Warming up or it's also called IceBreaker”Start

• What happens during this stage
• What kind of personality did you associate yourself with
• Which emojis did we use most often in our correspondence?
• The two most popular phrases you've sent
• Participants share their experiences of the most used sites.
• What kind of music inspired us

The main thing at this step is to create dynamics and you can also turn on energetic music before starting. I was playing a video with music from the Burning Man festival.History and artifacts of the teamThen, if time permits, you can recall the funny incidents and jokes that occurred in the team over the past year.

For example, like this

At this stage, it is necessary to strictly moderate the timing. As experience has shown, you can lose a lot of time at this stage (

Then, almost no one in the same team wanted to remember what skills the team members had acquired, so we switched to the traditional retro part.Traditional Retro

But apart from the well-established questions, “What was good?“What was wrong?”There were questions, 'What didn't you expect?”“Are you ready to shout something to someone else?”What are your most important lessons of the year?”Don't forget to discuss Action Points at this stage after discussing the question “What was wrong with the team's work?A look into the future

If you make it, you can reach the “Look Ahead” step.

Why is it needed?As my experience has shown, this is an opportunity to collect expectations from the overall work and personal requests of team members. Queries are also likely to be clustered. "Words of gratitude (Kudos)"Finally, I suggest you take at least 10 minutes to thank each other. Perhaps now some of the words will be insincere and unjustified, but as experience shows, this is an opportunity to make the overall work more comfortable and motivating.

This is what this template looks like

To summarize, the templates you use may not always fully cover your needs and needs. But they will definitely help you to offer something new in your work and enrich your toolkit)Would you like to share your experience of conducting year-end retrospectives?